"Critical Distance" - A photography blog by Mark Maio

“Critical Distance” is the first commandment of acoustics. It is defined as the location from the sound source where sound and reverberant sound are equal.

In photography, I see critical distance as a similar process of balance. After making a photograph, I step back from my emotional connection to the image to a point where I can evaluate it based on the strength of whether it communicates what I felt.

"Critical Distance" will address a wide range of photography related topics that I find both interesting and worth sharing with friends and colleagues. Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, as my goal is to stimulate a dialog that will help all of us become better photographers.

Mark Maio

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"Critical Distance" blog by Mark Maio - Little Zion Congregational Church, Chackbay, LA. After my last post on the "u-turn", I came across this image I made two weeks ago on a photography trip with friends about an hour and a half west of New Orleans, LA.

The numerous posts over the past few days on social media in remembrance of Ansel Adam's birthday reminded me of a lesson I learned from John Sexton early in my photographic career.

I attended the last Ansel Adams Workshop in Yosemite National Park the year after Ansel's passing. Like many photographers of my age and generation, we learned photography with a 4X5 view camera and black & white film using Ansel's Zone System of exposure and development. Also, like many photographers back then, I dreamed of attending his workshop. I couldn’t imagine anything better than working with the photographer that I not only admired but who also wrote the books and created the photographic workflow that shaped the core of my photography.

Someday I would go to the workshop. “Someday” - the word we use as we postpone doing something we know we need to do. Then "someday" in the future things change, and perhaps we don't have the option anymore or we never quite do what we planned. I was determined that if I didn't attend while Ansel was alive, I would attend any final workshop planned after his passing.

The photographers instructing at that workshop changed my photographic life. I went expecting to learn new technical aspects of photography and a funny thing happened: the instructors never discussed exposure, film development or cameras at all. What they did do was challenge us to understand why we were making photographs. What were we trying to say through them?

We spent hours sharing information and discussing photographs in small groups, interacting with each of the featured photographers including Paul Caponigro, Ernst Haas, Jerry Uelsmann, Ted Orland and John Sexton.

In our session with John Sexton, he showed us original Ansel Adams 8X10 negatives, the straight contact print and the final interpretive print made by Ansel. Holding up the original negative for "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico", he told the story of how Ansel was driving down the road, saw the light reflecting off the crosses, stopped his car, immediately set up his camera, and quickly made one exposure. By the time he turned his film holder around for a second exposure, the light had faded.

John then went on to tell us that the best accessory we have in our camera bag was the u-turn. He said most of us drive by something we want to photograph and for a multitude of reasons, convince ourselves that someday we'll come back and make that photograph. Like many of you reading this, I have had the good intention of doing that hundreds of times and almost never actually kept the promise to myself. I could do a book of all the images from over the years that I would have made “someday" IF I had ever gone back.

The images in today's blog post were made a few miles from our second home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Just south of Portree, the capital of the island, the roads begins a long, steep climb into the Cuillin Mountains. About half way up, there is a parking area that offers an ever changing view of the mountains. On numerous trips to the south of the island I have stopped there to photograph the beautiful mixture of clouds and light that are so unique to Skye.

On this drive, for the first time ever, a herd of Highland cattle were grazing next to the parking area. I drove by, made my u-turn at the first opportunity (while repeating out loud John’s observation about the best accessory in my camera bag) and pulled into the parking area to make a few images before the cattle decided to move on. The parking area was crowded with people with the same idea, and instead of photographing the cattle, I made photographs of others as they photographed the cattle. I became immersed in photographing a couple focused on what seemed to be one of the cattle posing for them.

I then turned to find my wife Catherine engaged in conversation with two couples on the other side of the parking area. As I walked over I noticed one of the men, who besides being extremely tall, was dressed in traditional Scottish clothes. Given that it was the middle of tourist season, I assumed he was dressed like that to lead a group around the island. In fact, he dressed that way everyday and was with friends from North Carolina.

As we finished our conversation, his friend from North Carolina asked him to stand by the fence so he could make a photograph. While he posed himself I asked if I could also make a photograph and he agreed. As I looked through the viewfinder it was if I had hired a model, dressed him, posed him, and used auxiliary lighting to “create” the photograph. Everything was perfect.

I drove away fully understanding John’s words of advice. I also realized that, as photographers, sometimes the photograph we think we are supposed to make is only a map leading us to the real reason for being there. "Someday” is really today.

Before I discuss the attached image, I wanted to point out that the main reason for creating "Critical Distance" was to have a forum for discussion. Of course it would help if I had actually enabled the discussion plugin on my site. I hope I have it now corrected and it shows up in this post. Customer service at my web hosting site has assured me that it is ready to go but I won't believe it until I see it posted. If you have a comment to add (or image to share), please post it and I am told it should go out to everyone subscribed to my blog. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

As I was going through images last week from my September 2016 Silo City workshop, I came across another self-portrait. Given I have led off my blog with two self-portrait posts, it would seem like I make these type of images all the time. The reality is these are the only two I think I have ever made and I was surprised to find this second example.

During my Silo City workshop, I typically do not photograph nor do I vertically explore the over half a million square feet of abandoned space in the grain elevators. I feel my job is to be centrally located on the ground and be available to the attendees so I can help them make good photographs.

This past September the weather for the workshop wasn't ideal. We had some rain, clouds and high winds most of the time we were photographing. Finally, early on the last morning, a high-pressure front came in off Lake Erie and the clouds moved out. I was walking back from the Buffalo River when the sun came up behind me very low on the horizon. For those who have been to Silo City, especially their first time, it is impossible not to be constantly looking up as you walk through the canyons of grain elevators stretching towards the sky. Instead, since I spend a few weeks a year there, when I do have a camera in my hand I tend to follow the light, letting it lead me to images not typically seen. I noticed my long shadow being cast along the ground over a puddle of water left from the rain the night before. I also noticed the white facade of one of the grain elevators reflected in the water. Given my over twenty-five years of photographing in and around that area of Buffalo's grain industry, I felt it was a perfect representation (and reflection) of my photographic life spent there.

Of all my photographs, the one I probably get asked to explain more than any other is "Self-Portrait".

I grew up in a very close, extended Italian family. All my grandparents were from the same small village in Sicily and all my aunts and uncles married other Italians. My grandfather, a coal miner in Pennsylvania, died of black lung a few months after my mother was born in 1929. After his death, my grandmother and her eight children moved back to Milwaukee’s Italian East Side. It was the start of the Depression and my mother's older brothers had to leave high school and find work to support the family. This predominately Italian neighborhood fostered interdependence between friends and relatives which continued even after most of them moved to the suburbs to raise my cousins and I.

Although as I grew up my relatives no longer lived down the street from one another, my weekends were filled with activities centered on my extended family. I saw the thirty or so first cousins on my mother’s side every week at family events. My cousins and I were more like brothers and sisters and my aunts and uncles became extensions of my parents. All my relatives worked in blue-collar jobs and none of them even thought about moving away from the family to take a job. My father and my uncles worked supporting their family's at the same job their entire careers until retirement. Having survived the Depression and serving in World War II, none of them had the opportunity to go to college or take a chance and chase their dream in some other part of the country.

Being raised Italian Catholic, there were certain expectations our parents had of us. Besides the obvious - religion, the unspoken but predominate one was that like them, we would find a job, get married and live as close as possible to the rest of the family in Milwaukee. While I enjoyed growing up like I did and loved the closeness of my extended family, I never felt like this was my destiny. I knew there was something more I was going to do and ultimately it wasn’t going to be in Milwaukee.

I made the self-portrait as a class assignment while I was attending college getting my degree in photography. In order to afford to go to college, I lived at home, worked in a steel mill at night, sold my car and took the bus to school every day. The bus route included a trip via a long viaduct that connected downtown to the south side of the city over an industrial valley. Below was a tire recycling plant I could see from my elevated bus seat on my way home. It always interested me as I watched the late afternoon light scrape across the shapes and forms of the mountains of tires. Thinking about my self-portrait assignment after riding the bus past the tire plant for a few days, it occurred to me that I felt like that one whitewall tire sitting there in a huge sea of black wall tires. In many ways I was like the rest of the tires but something about me felt different. I couldn't articulate it at the time but it was as if the other tires represented my life in Milwaukee if I stayed. I decided to come back and make a photograph of that as my self-portrait.

It was early spring and I waited for one of those unusual days in Milwaukee when the sun was actually out. There was no place to park on the viaduct and since it was about a mile long with the tire plant at the midway point, I had my girlfriend drop me off with my 4 X 5 view camera attached to a tripod and come back an hour later to pick me up.

I was the only student to turn in an image not actually made of themselves. I remember it didn’t go over too well with my professor, but I always liked the image and still show it. As it turned out, besides me, only one other cousin decided to move away from Milwaukee.